Lord Ashcroft has published his poll on the Clacton by-election, which is to be held on the 9th of October, which is David Cameron’s birthday, like the survation poll, it shows Douglas Carswell comfortably winning for UKIP, the polling on him personally shows why he is course to become UKIP’s first elected MP and hold the seat at the General Election.

Is Carswell principled? Should he have waited until the GE? Has he been a good MP? Was he scared of losing as a Tory? pic.twitter.com/GCdAn1heJD

Ashcroft follows ICM in reallocating DKs in accordance with 2010 vote. Only problem with Clacton is that UKIP deliberately didn’t stand against Carswell because it broadly approved of him. So part of his vote in 2010 can be said not to be CON but UKIP.

The figures to be looking out for are the pre-allocated ones.

Lord Ashcroft notes

In the Clacton poll, since it is not possible to guess what those who claimed to have voted UKIP in 2010 really did â€“ whether they voted at all, and if so for which party â€“ there were two options for dealing with them. One was to assume they did not vote at all, which seems a sweeping response and unlikely to be true. The other â€“ which is what we have done â€“ is to treat them as though they did vote, but for a party other than the Conservatives, Labour or the Liberal Democrats. As such, they appear in the tables in the Others column under â€˜2010 Voteâ€™.

As it happens, treating them the other way would have made only a marginal difference to the overall result â€“ which is, with more than five weeks until polling day, a snapshot not a forecast.